Saturday, October 21, 2006

The Harmful Helmet

I have posted about the Australian philosopher Peter Singer once before when I chaired a debate at Foyle's. By inspiring the animal rights and liberation movements, he has become, perhaps, the most celebrated and effective philosopher in the world. I was vaguely disappointed at that debate, feeling my own aversion to utilitarianism had not seriously been challenged. I am even more disappointed by an article by Singer in the Guardian today. This is an extraordinarily muddled piece of thinking in which he starts out by discussing gay rights and then swerves weirdly into an irrelevancy about motorcyle helmets. Should the state have the right to make people wear helmets in order to prevent them harming themselves? This is legal paternalism, though Singer then argues it is, in fact, moral paternalism. In either form, it appears to breach John Stuart Mill's cardinal principle that the state can only intervene in the life of the individual to prevent harm to others. Harm to oneself is one's own business. What Singer leaves out is that not wearing a helmet can cause harm to others - by, for example, imposing avoidable costs of treatment in the event of an accident or by involving another road user in an incident made more serious by the lack of a helmet. Mill could not convincingly argue against helmets and Singer, I fear, has lost it.

4 comments:

  1. A life lived by the tenets of utilitariansim may be admirable but I confess to to a strong inner reaction against it. To me it seems ultimately a dreadful, dead straightjacket. Maybe it's the idea of the self bowing down to reason as if rationality is the mster of my being rather than a aspect of it.

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  2. Bryan, you are, I fear, unacquainted with Singer who has an appalling reputation downunder, not least for his strange behaviour. He's certainly no icon.

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  3. Andrew, I'm not sure a life lived according to the tenets of utilitarianism is admirable. I'm not even sure it is possible. For starters, utilitarianism is only possible if it is adopted within a wider social and politcal context. An individual living in a society which is not governed according to the principles of utilitarianism would probably end up in prison (about which Bentham had some supremely rational though unpalatable ideas if I'm not mistaken).

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  4. Bryan, you are mixing up doing physical harm to another with financial cost to another imposed upon him by the state forcing him to pay the price of someone else's accident. This is a good example of the subtle immorality of the welfare state eroding people's sense of right and wrong.
    Necessity has been the plea of tyrants down the ages.

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